One red morning I stepped on a mystery and it beseeched me take another step and find its answer. Finding and Seeking are different people and I quickly resolved to make both my friends.
I then sought my muses and asked them to peer into the void and see what I couldn’t. And this I asked of them:
Why am I here?
Why was I born?
Why with this body, mind and spirit?
Why in this land, community and time?
Why with these parents, siblings and kin?
Why with these attributes, defects and talents?
I stepped back to allow my muses – serious, silly, profound, caring, sarcastic, pedantic, analytical and intuitive muses – a space to solve my riddles. But they were unmoving and unmoved by my query.
Their silence unnerved me and, with a shuddering heart, I remained as still as the sky and as silent as a cloud.
See, I have written 20 books and have another million words in my computer, clamouring to find a page in another published book. So, these muses of mine have uttered many words, over the green bridge of time. In fact, they’ve said more than I have preferred, at times, when I was least able to raise my spirits and my pen. But, on they would chatter, unabated and unconcerned for my mental and physical health.
The Great Mystery, as I look behind me, is that they are their most eloquent when I’m my most vulnerable and fragile. As my vital essences lay down, so does my babbling ego, opening the blue door to that greater awareness, the mystery unravellers, those Muses of Mine.
But, this red morning, they kept their silence as never before and I kept my anxiety … and my questioning.
Were my questions too deep?
Were my questions too numerous?
Were my questions too unreachable?
Was I too attached to my questions?
And then it hit me as the Hammer of Thor might.
Their silence was the answer.
There is no meaning to life.
There is no meaning to my life … well, not in the way I expected to discern it.
There is no Grand Destiny or Big Hairy Goal for anyone to go running after.
Yes, some people achieve amazing things and we might say that the coincidences and synchronicities that led them there is proof that their destiny was set.
However, similar coincidences and synchronicities awaited a million others and they received or took no benefit from destiny’s maze.
God has not taken up hir hammer and chisel and etched these words in the sky: “Dear Reader, your life purpose is this (or that) and you must do this (or that) today.”
The purpose of your life (and mine) is that which we just did …
You helped an old man into his wheelchair,
You listened to a lost and worried teenager,
You gave a waitress a giggle with your dad joke,
You picked up an old lady’s walking stick for her,
You told someone you love them,
You told someone they were beautiful,
You told someone you cared by stopping to listen,
You put a life-affirming post on social media,
You didn’t become angry at someone who damaged your car by mistake,
You took the blame for someone else’s accident,
You let someone else take the glory for your invention.
“Your mission in this life-span,” my muses finally counselled, “is the last kind choice you made.” … and that is why their breath remained empty of advice before.
As I took a third step through the sacred mystery, its yawning maw turned to a smile and my new friends, Searching and Finding, held hands and I heard no more words from my chattering muses as their applause drowned out any possible answers.
And I smiled and so did you … kindly.
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